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University of the Witwatersrand Institute for Advanced Social Research UNIVERSITY OF THE WITWATERSRAND INSTITUTE FOR ADVANCED SOCIAL RESEARCH Seminar Paper to be presented in RW 7003 SEMINAR ROOM AT 4.00pm 29th AUGUST 1994 Title: "If we can't call it the mfecane, then what can we call it?": Moving the debate forward. by: John Wright No 364 The mfecane as fetish In the last six years a major controversy has blown up among historians of southern Africa about the historical reality or otherwise of the phenomenon commonly known as the mfecane.1 Since it was first popularized by John Omer-Cooper in his book The Zulu Aftermath, published in 1966,2 the term has become widely used as a designation for the wars and migrations which took place among African communities across much of the east- ern half of southern Africa in the 1820s and 1830s. For more than a century before Omer-Cooper wrote, these upheavals had been labelled by writers as 'the wars of Shaka' or 'the Zulu wars'; today the view remains deeply entrenched among historians and public alike that the conflicts of the period were touched off by the explosive expansion of the Zulu king- dom under Shaka. In a chain reaction of violence, so the story of the mfecane goes, warring groups carried death and destruction from the Zululand region southwards into Natal and the eastern Cape, westward onto the highveld, and northwards to the Limpopo river and beyond. The violence came to an end only when most of the communities which had managed to survive the supposed chaos of the times had been amalgamated into a number of large defensive states under powerful kings. Since Julian Cobbing published his now well-known critique of the concept of the mfecane in 1988,3 a number of other histor- ians, myself among them, have joined him in challenging the idea that the concept has any descriptive or analytical value. These historians do not deny that the 1820s and 1830s were a time of often fierce conflict in much of southern Africa, but they regard the notion of the mfecane as a fundamental obstacle to understanding the history of the sub-continent in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.4 1. This paper draws on an earlier one, entitled 'Raiding, trading and political change: the central and eastern regions from the 1760s to the 1830s', which I presented to the Second Colloquium on School History Textbooks for a Democratic South Africa held in Rustenburg in November 1993. 2. J.D. Omer-Cooper, The Zulu Aftermath: A Nineteenth Century Revolution in Bantu Africa, London, 1966. 3. J. Cobbing, 'The mfecane as alibi: thoughts on Dithakong and Mbolompo', Journal of African History, vol. 29 (1988), pp. 487-519. 4. Many of the debates which have emerged since 1988 round the concept of the mfecane are taken up in the collection of essays currently being edited by Carolyn Hamilton under the title, The Mfecane Aftermath. Publication jointly by Witwatersrand University Press and Natal University Press is due early in 1995. My thanks to the editor and pub- lishers for permission to see pre-publication proofs of this work. As I see it, there are six particular sets of objections that can be raised against the notion of the mfecane. First, it serves to maintain the long-established segregation from each other of histories which, it is increasingly clear to some historians, were becoming more and more intertwined from at least the mid-eighteenth century onwards: that is, the history of the white-dominated societies of the expanding Cape colony, and the history of the black societies of the southern African interior. Second, it lumps together histories which need to be treated separately: for example, the history of the Natal region in the later eighteenth century, of the southern highveld in the 1820s, of central Mozambique in the 1830s, of Malawi in the 1840s. Third, it is voraciously and irredeemably teleological. It has long since swallowed up the history of the Zululand region in the later eighteenth century by portraying it as little more than a preface to the postulated 'Zulu explosion' of the 1820s. In Omer-Cooper's latest treatment of it, it is similarly threatening also to absorb the pre-1820s history of the western Transvaal, the eastern Transvaal, Natal-Mpondoland, and the Cape northern frontier region.5 Fourth, it makes for a heavily distorted periodization of political change by focussing mainly on the 1820s and 1830s, and largely neglecting previous decades. Fifth, it unproblematically attributes the often violent political transformations of the 1820s and 1830s primarily to the expansion of the Zulu kingdom, and underplays or neglects wider sets of causes. In particular, it has virtually nothing to say about the impact of forces rooted in the expansion of the frontiers of European trading, raiding and settlement. Sixth, it greatly exaggerates the level of violence and destruction that took place in the 1820s and 1830s. In one account after another, words like 'chaos', 'turmoil', 'bloodshed', 'massacres', 'holocaust' are used without reflec- tion to describe the events of the period. Critics of the concept of the mfecane are by no means united in their attempts to provide alternative explanations of the political changes which were taking place in the interior and eastern regions of southern Africa from the mid-eighteenth century onward. They also argue from widely divergent per- spectives about the meanings that can be read into particular sources of evidence. Often fierce criticisms of aspects of their arguments, particularly of Cobbing's, have been made by other historians.5 This is not the place to spell out in the detail the various lines of debate which have emerged. But we need to register that one of the effects of these debates, 5. J.D. Omer-Cooper, 'Has the Mfecane a future? A response to the Cobbing critique'. Journal of Southern African Studies r vol. 19, no. 2 (1993), pp. 273-94; J.D. Omer-Cooper, His- tory of Southern Africa. 2nd ed., Cape Town, 1994, pp. 52- 68. 6. See Hamilton, ed., Mfecane Aftermath, in press. both written and spoken, has been to leave numbers of readers and listeners in a state of deep confusion. This is hardly surprising when the participants themselves are not agreed what they are arguing about. Critics of the mfecane want to abandon the notion altogether, and move away from what they see as its inescapably Zulu-centric genre of explanations (even if, at this stage of the debate, they are not always able to expunge the word from the titles of their papers). Some critics of the critics, like Jeff Peires, con- tinue to feel that the main issue has to do with the rise of the Zulu state, and want to hold on to the established notion of the mfecane.7 Others, like Omer-Cooper, seek to define a new kind of mfecane so as to accommodate some of the chal- lenges that have been made to the old one.8 Other authors, more sympathetic to the critics, recognize the need to move on from Zulu-centric interpretations but still want to retain the term mfecane or difaqane as a generic designation for the upheavals of the 1820s and 1830s.9 Confusions are compounded by the inclination of some of Cobbing's critics to dismiss holus bolus what they call 'the Cobbing hypothesis' because of the major flaws in his use of evidence. Here they fail to distinguish between a general and a particular hypothesis which emerge from his arguments. The former, which in my view constitutes a major contribution to South African historiography, and is difficult to gainsay, has to do with his identification of European commercial and colo- nial expansion as having been a major factor in the history of the interior and east from at least the mid-eighteenth century onward. The latter, in criticisms of which I concur, has to do with the heavy emphasis which he places on the role of European slave-raiding. It is perfectly possible, in fact necessary in my view, to query the latter while holding on to the former. Against this background of disagreement about the nature of the disagreements on the mfecane,10 it is understandable that after one particular seminar a historian colleague could turn to me with the question which I have incorporated into the title of this paper, 'If we can't call it the mfecane, then 7. J.B. Peires, 'Paradigm deleted: the materialist interpreta- tion of the Mfecane', Journal of Southern African Studies, vol. 19, no. 2 (June 1993), pp. 295-313. 8. See note 4 above; also the critical comments on Omer- Cooper's revised views in my essay, 'Beyond the concept of the "Zulu explosion": comments on the current debate', in Hamilton, ed., The Mfecane Aftermathf in press. 9. Neil Parsons, A New History of Southern Africa. 2nd ed. , London, 1993, p. vi & chs. 5 & 6. 10. For more comments on this point, see Carolyn Hamilton's introductory essay to The Mfecane Aftermath. what can we call it?' My answer to this question takes two forms. The first is simply that there is no single 'it' out there to give a name to in the first place. The issue is not about finding a new name for a particular historical 'event' or set of events. Nor is it about finding new causes for such an event. It has to do with abandoning not just the name but the whole concept of the mfecane. In this connection, it would, I suggest, be highly instructive to consider the effects of what Edwin Wilmsen in another con- text has called 'the need to name'.11 We need to ask why, since at least the mid-nineteenth century, so many students of southern African history have had a powerful and deep-seated need to see an 'it' in the upheavals of the 1820s and the 1830s, and to give that 'it' a name - the wars of Shaka, the Zulu wars, and now, more singularly than ever, the mfecane.
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